Customizing the Body (PDF file) - Print My Tattoo

171 Epilogue 2008
design and execute it. Stylistically, the collection will have a continuity
that is hard to achieve when individual tattoos or segments
of a body suit are acquired piecemeal over time. Full-suit
commissions are still rare in the West, however, and the skills and
experience necessary for an artist to design a full suit are even
less common. Understandably, collectors who commission full
suits typically must engage in a considerable amount of logistical
planning and consultation with an artist. Collectors also frequently
travel great distances at substantial expense to see the
project through to its completion.
Tattoo Media and Tattoo Conventions
In the late 1980s there were a few films about tattooing, but
none were readily available. Peter Fonda hosted a documentarystyle
film called Signatures of the Soul: A Look at Modern Tattooing
(1987, directed by Geoff Steven), and there was a B-movie suspense
thriller called Tattoo (1981, directed by Bob Brooks and
starring Maude Adams and Bruce Dern). But if you wanted genuinely
informative documentary material about tattooing, you
had to read Tattootime or The Tattoo Advocate, the only available
“serious” tattoo publications, or you had to have access to ethnographer
Alan Govenar’s film on the old-time tattooer, Stoney
St. Clair (Stoney Knows How, 1981), or the documentary focused
on artist Don Ed Hardy and the San Francisco tattoo scene produced
by Tattootime (Tattooing Reality: Hardy and Associates
Make their Marks, 1988). In contrast, at this writing, there are
almost too many documentaries to count, many of them airing on
PBS, Discovery Channel, A&E, and other standard cable channels.
There are also two reality programs (A&E’s “Inked” and The
Learning Channel’s “Miami Ink”) centered on tattoo shops. While
the tattooists working in those shops are not always as informed
as they might seem to the everyday casual viewer, they do encounter
a wide variety of requests for different tattooing styles
from their clientele. As moderately competent tattoo artists, they
need to know what “kanji” are (currently fashionable Japanese
ideography often used to represent spiritual principles in tattooing),
what a “koi” is (a Japanese carp used to symbolize perseverance
in Japanese tattoo iconography), and how symmetry works
in tribal tattooing in order to make a living at their trade. Even in
Las Vegas and Miami where the shows are set (neither city is